When you are dealing with petabytes of data, there are definitely some great advantages of getting everything centralized in the cloud, but yes, the hidden costs could add up quite a bit when you think of replication and disaster recovery. For one, because critical data is now stored fully in the cloud as opposed to locally on one site, you could be hit with a huge downtime should you need to failover that much data to another location if the cloud storage goes down. I've seen a few organizations do a selective backup/replication to an onsite for these reasons. A bit of a step backwards, but it is just one of those things that folks need to keep in mind when leveraging a single point of cloud storage for such a huge amount of data.

This piece by Nasuni CEO Rodriguez is an extension of his earlier theme, The Thinning of the Data Center. By putting a cloud-integrated storage device in between your data generating sources and cloud service providers, you end up with a device that looks like traditional NAS, but in fact it extends the storage network out to one or more cloud services. IT then has to decide whether this is a good strategy for its future expansion of storage. In addition to potential savings, there may be hidden costs. There are also hidden advantages: automated data replication, dispersal of data set copies.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.